Download Code: A look back at just under the wire holiday releases

Download Code: A look back at just under the wire holiday releases

That’s a wrap; 2012 is done for video games.

This Tuesday saw the last major release of the year, Far Cry 3, and with four weeks left in 2012, we basically have a respite to actually churn through the pile of games that have been stacking up for the past few months.

But it isn’t always so, sometimes big games sneak through and wind up getting released late in December, leading to the occasional frantic parent who has to spend Christmas Eve in an electronics store in search of a last minute addition to the pile under the tree.

So while it appears there won’t be any last minute blockbusters this year, let’s take a look back at four notable late December releases from years past.

Before it made Halo, the shooter that put Bungie Software on the map was Marathon: the Mac’s answer to Doom. Marathon was perhaps a more cerebral game than Doom (there was a lot less shooting and a lot more interacting with crazy AIs for a start) and it laid the groundwork for Bungie’s more famous Xbox series. The funny thing about Bungie was that before it was bought by Microsoft, it was perhaps one of, if not the, strongest proponent of the Mac as a gaming platform.

Final Fantasy X — SquareSoft — Playstation 2 — December 20, 2001

The tenth numbered Final Fantasy game was supposed to come out in early January 2002, but was pushed into stores at the last minute to get the game out before Christmas. The move to get in before the Christmas rush wasn’t without compromises. Several additions to the the Japanese version of the game, additioal boss fights and character customization options mostly, were features which had to be stripped out of the Western version at the last minute to get it out on time. The new content did surface eventually: It appeared in the misnamed Final Fantasy X International, a re-release which only came out in Japan, despite the “International” content never appearing anywhere but the game’s home country.

Knights of the Old Republic 2 — Obsidian — Xbox/PC — December 6, 2003

Knights of the Old Republic 2 was notable in that it was also pushed from a late January release to December. However, unlike FFX, which just lost a little bit of optional content, KOTOR 2 basically had the back end of the game gutted. While it’s likely that the amount of unfinished content would have remained unfinished even with another two months to work on the game, the team at Obsidian would have likely had more time to actually smooth off some of the rough edges where stuff was chopped. The final mission of the game in particular features a few half-finished sequences that barely make sense. The PC version of the game has actually just recieved a large fan patch which restores a large portion of the cut content … only nine years later.

Star Wars: The Old Republic — BioWare Austin — PC — December 20, 2011

The MMO sequel to KOTOR 2 only sort of came out on December 20: through the whole month publisher Electronic Arts had slowly been letting people with pre-orders enter the game in a bid to avoid a huge clump of people logging in all at once on launch day. It mostly worked, the launch was relatively stable, people were singing praises for the game, and the lack of competition meant people had lots of time to sink into the Massively Multiplayer RPG. In fact, the biggest problem was that there were fairly large server queues because the people who started early still wanted to keep playing. It’s strange to think that just a few months later the servers would be ghost towns and EA would be forced to move the game free-to-play before SWTOR’s first anniversary.